چکیده انگلیسی

Urban man-made assets have impacts not just on those who develop, build and operate them, but on people who may be quite remote from them. For example, the impact of a building on greenhouse gas emissions arising from fossil fuel use, pollution caused by travel to work patterns and employment opportunities provided by urban developments may be far removed from their immediate locality. There is a growing recognition of the need to internalize these external costs and benefits in accountancy frameworks, drawing on experiences in accounting for sustainable development. This desire, however, presents major challenges in identifying, evaluating and allocating the external environmental, social and economic costs and benefits of an urban environment. This paper reports on the development of an Urban Development Sustainability Assessment Model (UD-SAM) which allows decision makers to identify sustainability indicators (economic, environmental and social) and which may lead to more holistic evaluation of the sustainability impact of elements of the urban environment. The UD-SAM builds on a sustainability assessment model (SAM) developed originally in the oil industry. This paper describes how SAM has been tailored for the construction industry and urban sustainability assessment, and how a set of generic sustainable development indicators have been identified and validated by stakeholders.

مقدمه انگلیسی

Urban development has special importance within the broader context of sustainability. In 2005, the world’s urban population was 3.17 billion out of a world total of 6.45 billion (UN-HABITAT, 2007). Current trends predict that the number of urban dwellers will keep rising, reaching almost 5 billion by 2030 out of a world total of 8.1 billion (UN-HABITAT, 2007). Due to the density of populations and the intensity of economic and social activities, urban areas are also major consumers of resources, producers of waste and pollution, degraders of the environment, and foci for social problems. Building and construction activities worldwide consume 3 billion tons of raw materials each year, or 40% of total global use (Roodman & Lenssen, 1995). Construction, mainly for urban man-made assets, accounts for around 10% of national GDP globally (Howard, 2000). At the same time, there is a growing requirement for the construction sector in the UK and in other countries to adopt the principles of sustainability in their activities and polices (Augenbroe & Pearce, 1998; Brandon, 2005; Curwell, Yates, Howard, Bordass, & Doggart, 1999; Department for Trade & Industry, 2006; OECD, 2002 and OECD, 2003; United States Green Building Council, 2003; Walton et al., 2005). As a result, environmental and societal issues are increasingly being considered alongside functional and economic aspects of built environment by architects, surveyors, engineers, project managers and others responsible for making key decisions throughout the different stages in delivering an urban development project. Consequently, there is a demand for tools to support those decision makers in finding more sustainable solutions. For example, in the United Kingdom, some 25% of new office buildings have an environmental assessment (Hasegawa, 2002). Although sustainability assessment criteria are available, there is no single, robust methodology that can simultaneously quantify and assess all three dimensions (economic, social and environmental) of urban development.
Full cost accounting (FCA) has been identified as one way forward to analyse the environmental, social and economic costs and benefits at different spatial scales and at different stages in the life cycle (SUE-MoT, 2004b). The aim of this paper is to present the development of an integrated framework—an Urban Development Sustainable Assessment Model (UD-SAM) for assessment of economic, environmental and social impacts of buildings in the context of urban developments. This paper includes the following sections: background of this research, structure of UD-SAM, impact categories in the UD-SAM and a conclusion.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

As was noted at the beginning of this paper, urban development has special importance within the broader context of sustainability. In view of the growing complexity of managing the rapidly evolving urban environment and cities in Europe, there is a need for integrated approaches that assist city planners, developers and councillors in this undertaking (Rotmans & Asselt, 2000; Walton et al., 2005). Although sustainability assessment criteria are available, there is no single, robust methodology that can simultaneously quantify and assess all three dimensions (economic, social and environmental) of urban development. This paper reports the start of a process that seeks to develop of a holistic UD-SAM which allows decision makers to identify sustainability indicators (economic, environmental and social) for different assessment contexts. It brings together different types of impacts into a single, overall assessment at one or more stages in the building and urban planning cycle.
At the core of the UD-SAM, a set of UD-SAM impacts categories were created by consolidating existing sustainable development indicators across different scales. This outline set was then validated by stakeholders. This set of generic impacts categories provides an essential pre-requisite for the delivery of an integrated urban sustainability assessment tool. It answers one of the fundamental questions in an integrated urban sustainability assessment: what needs to be measured? It is hoped that this paper contributes to the literature by providing a transparent account of how a set of impacts categories can be generated. The purpose of the paper is not to present sophisticated valuation methods which can be used to populate the UD-SAM (this is the subject of ongoing work). Rather, the paper focuses on presenting a framework model which is mutually agreed by a wide range of stakeholders. Within the broader UD-SAM framework, particular attention has been placed on the development of the set of generic impacts categories. This is for several reasons. First, it simplified the complex issues related to urban development to a smaller set of impacts, so the UD-SAM can be easily used and make the assessment practical. Second, it integrated different values and perspectives to a single framework: it made the assessment relevant. Third, it set guidance on defining boundaries and data extraction.